


Waiting in the Wings

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:06:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21804889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: This isn’t a story about unicorns, or mermaids, or dragons or monsters. It’s not about love, or heroism, or standing up for what you believe in.It is, at some point, about one, or two, or all of those things. But this story, at its core, is about her.
Kudos: 1
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story I am playing around with, and will possibly never be complete. Putting on here to remind myself to work on it.

There are other things this story is not.

There are no hidden doors in the back of wardrobes, or secret schools hidden behind lush plantings. No lamps, in which rubbed a certain way, grant wishes of grandeur. No sticks with flourished ends that cast spells of smoke or fire.

There is a gate, but it remains unlocked to this day.

Anyone could walk through, should they choose. Even the girl in this story does not need a key. 

Not that she knows any of this yet.

Little Mary McGrath does not know many things, yet. She is only five at this point in our journey. And while five is an impressive age, and one she can count on one hand, her fingers pointing up to the sky as she proudly lists off each number, it is one that comes with little knowledge learned.

She does have a list of things she likes. The color yellow, like the daffodils that sit on her windowsill. She likes the socks in her drawer with the pink bows knitted on the front, and her black saddle shoes, and when her hair is tied up in a pony, which she swings from side to side as she runs.

She dislikes many things. Spinach, for one. The color green entirely. Her winter moccasins, which always seem to leak in snow as she tumbles to school in the morning. She likes her teacher, but she hates sitting at a desk, a broken crayon in one hand and a sheet of lines spread across the desktop. 

It will be three more years before she realizes that coloring within the lines is just not for her, and another ten before she finds the confidence to create her own marks, curving and winding across blank parchment. But for now, she is forced to fill the top part in blue, the bottom in green, the happy puppy in brown and black with a little pink nose. As if she is the only one who knows the sky is actually different shades of cerulean and lilac and on the third Tuesday of every month, a stark burning gold.

But she colors, because she is told to, and she doesn’t want to anger her father with another red cross across her daily reports. He leaves the following year, despite her many green checks in a row, despite her happy smile and her pink bows and her dog colored perfectly in the lines.

She will not see him again until she is eighteen, and when she does, she will not recognize him.


	2. Chapter 2

You ride the train every day. It tumbles and roars as it approaches your station, and yes, you like to think of it as yours, as you are one of the only patrons that boards between Wiltshire and Staphenshein. The gate creaks open and you board, ticket in hand although the conductor knows you by sight and waves you through without a blink. 

You find your seat, yes, yours, as you’ve been occupying it for the past seventeen Mondays in a row. It’s close enough to the airvent where you feel a nice breeze across your face, but far enough away from the clacking women in the back who work on their needlepoint and seem to occupy more space than their ticket allows.

It also has the best view of the stairs. 

The stairs, as you like to think of them, belong to the station in between your stops. You do not know the name of this station, or where the steps lead. Only that every commute, the train huffs and stops, the doors clang open, and everyone waits for patrons that never arrive.

You have never seen anyone at this stop. You have not seen anyone disembark at this location, nor have you ever noticed anything different with the curving vines and the stone pillars that surround the steps.

No one seems to notice, or to care that the train stops for no one. But you can’t help but wonder.

Perhaps if you rode the later train, or one slightly earlier than your already early schedule. Perhaps if you boarded during dusk, or in the chill of the night, you would see the mobs of patrons that frequent a stop so much that the train halts for it.

You’re wondering just this as you see the stone pillars in the distance, as the familiar screech of the brakes cause the locomotive to slow. You hear the creak of the gate as they open, and pause, and wait.

You stare at the stairs. Empty.

Usually. Except today, there is a single pink rose about ten steps up, resting along the forgotten cobblestone. It petals flutter in the early morning wind, like a sail. 

A sign of friendship; a sign of life. A sign of warning.

Before you can consider it further, the train roars into motion and the stairs are nothing but a blur behind you.

The next time you pass the stairs, the rose is gone. 


	3. Chapter 3

There are moments in life we blame on things. Fate, or chance, or intuition. 

When Jacob Randall arrives at his new school on the 27th of October, he blames it on his Uncle. At the ripe age of eleven years old, Jeremy had been ripped away from his friends and forced to move halfway across the country to a place that was already dusted with snow, a far cry from his previous harsh desert. 

He had made the basketball team at his previous school, a given considered his already five foot eight frame. His jersey had already been printed, bright yellow letters knitted across of a burgundy top. It was folded in the bottom of his suitcase when he left the heat and the cactus and the sand, but when he arrived in the blizzard, his jersey had disappeared.

Now, as he stares across the full cafeteria, at least six inches above every other student, Jeremy wishes he could disappear into tiny grains of dust. His coat is too small, purchased through an online establishment and unable to be exchanged before his steadfast journey. His sneakers are black, hightop, a red star on the heel, while every other student seemed to be in sturdy winter boots, sheepskin pouring over the tops of toggle-clad laces.

Jeremy sis at a table in the back, as far away from the troughs of food laced with pizza and stale bread and remnants of fruit. He pulls a yogurt out of his bag and folds the lid into a spoon, hooks a pair of headphones into his ears and tries to drown out the cacophony of pre-teen angst. 

Most who viewed him would see a tall lonely boy listening to potentially horrid rap music or perhaps some emotionally-clad grunge. They’d view his dark grey t-shirt and his frayed black jeans and his mess of hair and form an opinion about Jeremy Rudolph.

And they would be correct. He is angry, and lonely, and frustrated that his life is not his own yet. As he finishes his lemon yogurt, and tosses it into the closest receptacle, slinging his bag over his right shoulder, Jeremy has no idea he is being watched. And that his true adventure is about to begin.


End file.
